Spirit Hunter: The Haunting of American Culture by Myths of Violence: Speculations on Jeremy Blake's Winchester Trilogy

When Sarah Winchester's husband died, she inherited a fortune in profits from the Winchester Repeating Rifle. She spent the second half of her life building a 160-room Victorian mansion, a construction project designed never to end, as she believed that continuing to build would stave off the ghosts of those killed by Winchester guns. Jeremy Blake's Winchester Trilogy uses the huge, tangled structure that resulted, the definitive haunted house, to examine the haunting of American culture by violence. Spirit Hunter documents and analyzes his groundbreaking and critically acclaimed work--some say Blake has invented a new genre, between video and painting, and interest in his progress intersects a number of fields including art, film and fashion. Spirit Hunter also explores such disparate topics as frontier myth, American foreign policy, technology, early film history, psychoanalytic theory and philosophy--all in an accessible narrative style that interweaves art analysis with the story of a mythic haunting that still reverberates today.